Symmetric Key-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocols for RFID Security

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is being used in many industries from inventory tracking to human implants. However, there are many security issues in RFID systems. Many attacks like privacy related attacks, eavesdropping, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, de-synchronization attack, etc. are possible in RFID systems. Due to these security problems, an adversary can get important information which can be used to track the location of a person, steal information, etc. Many researchers have proposed protocols to cater for security. However, there are several drawbacks in existing protocols. For example, they do not support both active and passive tags. In many protocols, reader is not authenticated by server. Many protocols cannot be implemented in practice due to limitations in RFID tag computing ability. This motivated us to explore new protocols which can satisfy all security requirements of authentication protocols for RFID security at low cost. In this paper, we propose a suite of lightweight authentication protocols for RFID security which provide security against all known attacks. We have compared the security provided by the proposed protocols with those of the existing protocols, and shown that the proposed protocols meet most of the security requirements of authentication protocols for RFID security. Essentially, we propose two protocols with tag anonymity as an option. The first protocol ensures all security requirements at low cost. In the second and improved protocol, communication between server and reader is greatly reduced.